Peter's Tears: Some Literary Elements in Peter's Denial of Christ in Matthew

Peter’s denial of Christ, the historicity of which “it would be unjustified to contest,”[1] has rightly drawn the attention of innumerable commenters.  Many commentators however, as Schackenburg points out, get distracted by attempting to sort out the disagreements amongst the varying accounts discrepant details, thus losing some of the depth of the imagery presented to us by Matthew.  At any rate, he says, such fluidity of minor details “belong to the conventional freedom of narrative” of the time.[2]  Whatever the truth of this judgment it remains certain that if one loses the forest for the trees here, a very beautiful and subtle picture can no doubt be missed.  Stanley Hauerwas makes an initial and fascinating parallel.  Whereas in the boat rocked by storm the disciples panicked as Jesus slept, so Jesus is now in panic as wicked men plot against him in Gethsemane while the disciples sleep.  One is here reminded of Isaiah 57:20; for there the restless plotting of the wicked is likened to the movement of the sea.  Hauerwas concludes that the disciples surely “have not yet learned what is true danger,” and what is false.[3]  Indeed the irony here is that Peter’s sleep and inability to follow Jesus’ orders finds itself within a stone’s throw in the text to where Peter previously swore that he would die with Christ before ever denying Him (26:35).

The literary elements here become thick.  Peter ends up denying Christ three times.  Yet Christ’s agonizing three-fold prayer to His father parallels Peter’s three-fold denial.  Despite Christ having specifically taken Peter with Him, Peter is, three times, nowhere to be found for comfort.  So whereas Christ is three times alone in the darkness away from Peter, so too then in Peter’s denial is Peter away from Christ three times in the outer-darkness of the courtyard.  There is, it seems, actually a six-fold literary repetition emphasizing Peter’s distance.  When pressed, Peter even begins “oathing,” (26:72) that he does not know Christ, which aside from its overt untruthfulness also evokes the reader of Matthew to recall Christ’s own admonition against oaths, where one’s yes should be yes “and no, no” (Mt. 5:37).  This indeed is a dark moment.  At this point in the narrative we had been told that Peter would be the “rock” upon which Christ would build his church (Mt. 16:18); more generally Christ has given repeated warnings that following him truly means inviting persecution (10:38-39; 16:24-27).  Given that Peter’s denial follows Judas’ betrayal at the heels, we are here given the feeling that not only the fate of Jesus, but the fate of his church is at stake.[4]

As Jesus is led to Caiaphas, Peter had followed and maintained his distance from Christ [apo macroqen]; and when Matthew records in 26:75 that “[Peter] went outside and wept bitterly” [exw eklausen pikrwV] after he realizes Christ’s prediction of his denial came true, he is still distant from Christ in the darkness of the new morning and one cannot help but feel that in an oblique way Christ’s repeated image of the outermost darkness where there is weeping and gnashing of teeth is here being embodied in a proleptic way by Peter.

Yet on a macro-literary scale, if we compare this to other ancient literature, Peter’s tears are not entirely negative.  Indeed even within the story itself the tears represent an initial moment of repentance.  To an educated Greek who happened upon Matthew’s gospel, however, they would have meant something quite different.  Erich Auerbach in his famous study of Western literature notes, quite fascinatingly, that in Peter’s tears we have the first instance in antique literature of a commoner’s tears being valued as something truly tragic and meaningful.  Comparing Peter’s remorse to the emotional portraiture found in Petronius, Tacitus, Sallust, Homer, and Sophocles (among others) Auerbach sees Peter “as the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.”[5]  This is not merely a comment on the evolution of literature as an art.  As George Steiner wrote in Real Presences, “often a ‘theorizing’ gloss on literature or the arts is an argument on morality and the enactment of morality in the political realm.”[6] Many commentators have in fact seen this instance of Peter’s failure, and the fact that it was recorded, as itself evidence for the spiritual and moral revolution won by Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.  In fact Friedrich Nietzsche above all was aware of this new valuation of the “pathetic commoner,” which he entitled “the transvaluation of all antique values of heroism and might.”  Another commentator, the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, fills out Auerbach’s and Nietzsche’s description of Peter’s tears, and it behooves us to quote him at length:

To us today, this hardly seems an extraordinary detail of the narrative, however moving me may or may not find it; we would expect Peter to weep, and we certainly would expect any narrator to think the event worth recording. But, in some ways, taken in the context of the age in which the Gospels were written, there may well be no stranger or more remarkable moment in the whole of scripture. What is obvious to us--Peter's wounded soul, the profundity of his devotion to his teacher, the torment of his guilt, the crushing knowledge that Christ's immanent death forever foreclosed the possibility of seeking forgiveness for his betrayal--is obvious in very large part because we are the heirs of a culture that, in a sense, sprang from Peter's own tears. To us, this rather small and ordinary narrative detail is unquestionably an ornament of the story, one that ennobles it, proves its gravity, widens its embrace of our common humanity...To the literate classes of antiquity, however, this tale of Peter weeping would more likely have seemed an aesthetic mistake; for Peter, as a rustic, could not possibly have been a worthy object of a well-bred man's sympathy, nor could his grief possibly have possessed the sort of tragic dignity necessary to make it worthy of anyone's notice. At most, the grief of a man of Peter's class might have had a place in comic literature: the querulous expostulations of a witless peon, the anguished laments of a cuckolded taverner, and so on. Of course, in a tragic or epic setting a servant's tears might have been played as accompaniment to his master's sorrows, rather like the sympathetic whining of a devoted dog. But, when one compares this scene from the Gospels to the sort of emotional portraiture one finds in great Roman writers, comic or serious, one discovers--as the great literary critic Eric Auerbach noted a half a century ago--that it is only in Peter for the first time that one sees 'the image of man in the highest and deepest and most tragic sense.' Yet Peter remains, for all that, a Galilaean peasant. This is not merely a violation of good taste; it is an act of aesthetic rebellion."[7]

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[1] Rudolph Schnackenburg, The Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing, 2002), 279.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Stanley Haurwas, Matthew (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2006), 223.

[4] Robert Gundry, “Matthew” in Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible ed. Kevin Vanhoozer (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005) 490.

[5] Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 40-49.

[6] George Steiner, Real Presences (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991), 80.

[7] David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009) p.166-167.